Islandora CLAW

Islandora CLAW (formerly known as Islandora 7.x-2.x) is the next generation of Islandora. Still in development, this major upgrade will be compatible with Drupal 8 and Fedora 4. For more details, please check out the following resources:

Latest CLAW News

From September 19 - 23, a group of 16 developers from various institutions, with users of Hydra, Islandora, and Fedora, got together in State College, PA, to work on Fedora 4 features for the community. They worked in three teams:

Workflow

Fedora Import/Export

Admin Dashboard

Dan Coughlin has provided a summary of their accomplishments:

Workflow

The workflow team extracted the database-backed workflow implementation from Notre Dame’s Sipity application into CurationConcerns, using Princeton’s Plum workflow as an initial target for modeling multiple configurable workflows. Once completed, this work will enable workflows that will support mediated deposit approval workflows, digitization & metadata augmentation/review workflows, and takedown/revocation workflows. There are tickets for the remaining work in the CurationConcerns github repository, and there is a call being set up next week between some of the folks from the workflow team and the team that is working on the community sprint focused on mediated deposit. You can find more about the work in the workflow branch of CurationConcerns. Members of this team were Justin Coyne (Stanford), Jeremy Friesen (Notre Dame), Kyle Lawhorn (Cincinnati), and Michael Tribone (Penn State).

Fedora Import/Export

The import/export team started working on a BagIt implementation design including Bag Profile support for APTrust and MetaArchive. Their work included reviewing and updating documentation, and squashing bugs related to importing Fedora resources from the filesystem to prepare for an initial round of stakeholder feedback. The team finalized the tickets assigned to Phase 1 for import/export — more on the requirements and phases for this work. In December, some members of this team will begin Phase 2 of the sprint. There will be stakeholder calls in October and November to finalize the BagIt implementation design. In addition to work at the Fedora layer, support was added to CurationConcerns for running the Fedora import/export utility so that the tool can be called from the user interface. Members of this team were Esmé Cowles (Princeton), Karen Estlund (Penn State), Nick Ruest (York), Jon Stroop (Princeton), Andrew Woods (DuraSpace), and Adam Wead (Penn State).

Admin Dashboard

The administrative dashboard team added a configurable, extensible admin dashboard to CurationConcerns. The dashboard design allows flexible control over what appears in the dashboard menu, and in what order, in addition to what views are rendered and what data sources are used. The current implementation of the dashboard includes a pie chart widget displaying information about visibility of deposited works and also about embargoes and leases, allowing multiple levels of drill-down for more granular information. This early work has been merged into the master branch of CurationConcerns. To test how configurable and usable the new admin dashboard configuration is, the team started working on extending the CurationConcerns dashboard in Sufia and that currently sits in a branch. Remaining work has been ticketed using the 'admin dashboard’ label in both CurationConcerns and Sufia. Members of this team were Carolyn Cole (Penn State), Mike Giarlo (Stanford), Trey Pendragon (Princeton), Lynette Rayle (Cornell), and Thomas Scherz (Cincinnati).

The 10th Islandora CLAW Community Sprint finished up last week. Running August 22nd to September 5th, this sprint was mostly about learning and design, with "homework" tickets to read up on specifications, and long discussions about how various pieces of CLAW should work. You can do a little homework of your own and follow the discussions about ORE and IIIF.

The MVP for this sprint was Everyone. We had some really great discussions, both in GItHub issues and via IRC (#islandora on freenode).

Next up in CLAW Sprint 11, running September 19th - October 3rd. A few issues are listed here, with more to come. Non-developers may be interested in signing on for Homework Ticket #360, where we will be exploring the Drupal 8 UI. You can sign up for the sprint here.

Hi, I'm Danny, and I'm the newest hire of the Islandora Foundation. My role within the Foundation is to serve as Technical Lead, and I want to take some time to introduce myself and inform everyone of just exactly what I'll be doing for them.

I guess for starters, I should delve a bit into my background. Since a very young age, I've always considered myself to be pretty nerdy. As soon as I learned how to read, my father had me in front of a 386 and taught me DOS. In high school, I discovered Linux and was pretty well hooked. It was around that time I started working with HTML, and eventually javascript and Flash. I graduated with honors from East Tennessee State University with a B.Sc. in Mathematics and a Physics minor, and was exposed to a lot of C++ and FORTRAN. I specialized in Graph Theory, which I didn't think at the time would lead to a career as a programmer, since I had decided to be an actuary after completing school. Fast forward a few years, and I have a couple actuarial exams under my belt and have become well versed in VBA programming and Microsoft Office. But I didn't really like it, and wanted to do more than spreadsheet automation. So I moved to Canada and went back to school for Computer Science, but quickly found my way into the workforce for pragmatic reasons (read: I had bills to pay). I managed to score a job in the small video game industry that's evolved on PEI. I did more Flash (sadly) but was also exposed to web frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Django. A lot of my time was spent writing servers for Facebook games, and tackled everything from game logic to payment systems. But that career eventually burned me out, as it eventually does to most folks, and I applied for a position at a small company named discoverygarden that I heard was a great place to work.

And that's how I first met Islandora. I was still pretty green for the transition from Drupal 6 to 7, but shortly after the port I was able to take on more meaningful tasks. After learning tons about the stack while working with discoverygarden, I was given the opportunity to work on what would eventually become CLAW. And now I'm fortunate enough to have the opportunity to see that work through as an employee of the Islandora Foundation. So before I start explaining my duties as Tech Lead, I'd really like to thank the Islandora Foundation for hiring me, and discoverygarden for helping me gain the skills I needed to grow into this position.

Now, as is tradition in Islandora, I'll describe my roles as hats. I'm essentially wearing three of them:

Hat #1: 7.x-1.x guy

We have increasingly more defined processes and workflows, and I'm committed to making sure those play out the way they should. But, for whatever reason, If there's a time where a pull request has sat for too long and the community hasn't responded, I will make sure it is addressed. I will either try to facilitate a community member who has time/interest to look at it, and if that's not possible, I will review myself.

I will take part in and help chair committers' calls every other Thursday.

I will attend a handful of Interest Group meetings. There's too many for me to attend them all, but I'm starting with the IR and Security interest groups.

Lastly, I will be serving as Release Manager for the next release, and will be working towards continuing to document and standardize the process to the best of my abilities, so that it's easier for other community members to take part in and lead that process from here on out.

Hat #2: CLAW guy

We're currently in the process of pivoting from a Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 codebase, and I'm going to be sheparding that process as transparently as possible. This means I will be working with community members to develop a plan for the minimum viable product (or MVP for short). This will help defend against scope creep, and force ourselves as a community to navigate what all these changes mean. Between Fedora 4, PCDM, and Drupal 8, there's a lot that's different, and we need to all be on the same page. For everyone's sake, this work will be conducted as much as possible by conversations through the mailing lists, instead of solely at the tech calls. In the Apache world, if it doesn't happen on the list, it never happened. And I think that's a good approach to making sure people can at least track down the rationale for why we're doing certain things in the codebase.

Using the MVP, I will be breaking down the work into the smallest consumable pieces possible. In the past few years I've learned a lot about working with volunteer developers, and I fully understand that people have day jobs with other priorities. By making the units of work as small as possible, we have better chance of receiving more contributions from interested community members. In practice, I think this means I will be writing a lot of project templates to decrease ramp-up time for people, filling in boilerplate, and ideally even providing tests beforehand.

I will be heavily involved in Sprint planning, and will be running community sprints for CLAW.

I will be chairing and running CLAW tech calls, along with Nick Ruest, the CLAW Project Director.

Hat #3: UBC project guy

As part of a grant, the Foundation is working with the University of British Columbia Library and Press to integrate a Fedora 4 with a front-end called Scalar. They will also be using CLAW as a means of ingesting multi-pathway books. So I will be overseeing contractor work for the integration with Scalar, while also pushing CLAW towards full book support.

I hope that's enough for everyone to understand what I'll be doing for them, and how I can be of help if anyone needs it. If you need to get in touch with me, I can be found on the lists, in #islandora on IRC as dhlamb, or at dlamb@islandora.ca. I look forward to working with everyone in the future to help continue all the fantastic work that's been done by everyone out there.

Another Islandora CLAW volunteer sprint has come to a close! A whopping ten sprinters came together to finish up 11 tickets. This sprint's MVPs have to be Kirsta Stapelfeldt and Kim Pham from the University of Toronto Scarborough, who tackled a monumental documentation task to turn Diego Pino's CLAW lesson webinars into written docs, generating 65 pages of notes so far. The work continues, but this was an amazing start!

Following on our earlier announcement, the Islandora Foundation would like to announce that Daniel Lamb will be our Technical Lead, starting August 1st. The Islandora Technical Lead is responsible for providing leadership, technical guidance, coordination, and support to the open source community in the interests of releasing ongoing enhancements and maintenance to Islandora.

Danny comes to us from discoverygarden, Inc, where he has spent the better part of four years working with Islandora. He is uniquely suited to taking on the role of Islandora’s Technical Lead as both a long-time committer to the Islandora 7.x-1.x project and the primary architect of Islandora CLAW. He is also an experienced presenter and Islandora Camp instructor, an official Committer on both Islandora teams, and has long been a leader in the Islandora community. We did a Meet Your Developer interview with Danny back in 2014 if you want to learn more about his background and his approach to development.